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I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, 'What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?' and gave the obvious answer: jailers.
C. S. Lewis -
Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.
C. S. Lewis
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Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work build up in him a sense of being really at home on earth which is just what we want.
C. S. Lewis -
I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.
C. S. Lewis -
You ask ‘for what’ God wants you. Isn’t the primary answer that He wants you. We’re not told that the lost sheep was sought out for anything except itself [Matthew 18:12-14; Luke 15:3-7]. Of course, He may have a special job for you: and the certain job is that of becoming more and more His.
C. S. Lewis -
When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it. He has been a party to, has made, sustained and moved moment by moment within, all our earthly experiences of innocent love.
C. S. Lewis -
We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.
C. S. Lewis -
if anyone present wishes to make me the subject of his wit, I am very much at his service--with my sword--whenever he has leisure.
C. S. Lewis
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You're a mere chick. I remember you when you were a egg. Don't come trying to teach me, sir. Crabs and crumpets!
C. S. Lewis -
The process of being brought up, however well it is done, cannot fail to offend.
C. S. Lewis -
If we are any good we must always be working towards the moment at which our Pupils are fit to become our Critics & Rivals
C. S. Lewis -
No, I don’t wish I knew Heaven was like the picture in my Great Divorce, because, if we knew that, we should know it was no better. The good things even of this world are far too good ever to be reached by imagination. Even the common orange, you know: no one could have imagined it before he tasted it. How much less Heaven.
C. S. Lewis -
There is a story about a schoolboy who was asked what he thought God was like. He replied that, as far as he could make out, God was 'the sort of person who is always snooping around to see if anyone is enjoying himself and then trying to stop it.'
C. S. Lewis -
You don’t think – not possibly – not as a mere hundredth chance – there might be things that are real though we can’t see them? … If there are souls, could there not be soul-houses?
C. S. Lewis
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Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.
C. S. Lewis -
Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world.
C. S. Lewis -
Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it; the old Christian rule is, "Either marriage, with completely faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence."
C. S. Lewis -
Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country but for most of us it is only an imaginary country. Edmund and Lucy were luckier than other people in that respect.
C. S. Lewis -
But I remember more dearly autumn afternoons in bottoms that lay intensely silent under old great trees
C. S. Lewis -
Nature does not teach. A true philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of nature; an experience of nature cannot validate a philosophy. Nature will not verify any theological or metaphysical proposition (or not in the manner we are now considering); she will help to show what it means.
C. S. Lewis
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A Christian is not someone who never goes wrong, but one who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin again, because the Christ-life is inside him.
C. S. Lewis -
Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior.
C. S. Lewis -
The castle of Cair Paravel on its little hill towered up above them; before them were the sands, with rocks and little pools of salt water, and seaweed, and the smell of the sea and long miles of bluish-green waves breaking for ever and ever on the beach. And oh, the cry of the seagulls! Have you ever heard it? Can you remember?
C. S. Lewis -
Of course language is not an infallible guide, but it contains, with all its defects, a good deal of stored insight and experience.
C. S. Lewis